The top 10 best BTCC drivers of 2023 | GRR

10. Rory Butcher

Championship: 10th – 173pts

Wins: 1

It’s fairly safe to say that Rory Butcher will be glad to see the end of the 2023 season, a year which seemed to throw roadblocks at him at every turn. With the Toyota team struggling to get to grips with its new bespoke power unit, Butcher himself admitted that he wasn’t at his best in the opening rounds of the season.

It wasn’t a bad season, as the Scot still managed to finish in the top ten of the Drivers’ Championship by the end of the year, but it wasn’t quite to the standards that we’d come to expect from the Knockhill native. Just one win and a further single visit to the podium meant Butcher left with at least some silverware, and will be hoping after a full winter programme of testing both car and driver will be back to their best in 2024.

9. Andrew Watson

Championship: 15th – 93pts

Best result: 2nd

Coming from the World Endurance Championship and Blancpain GT Series, Andrew Watson joined the BTCC with one of the strongest CVs of any rookie in recent years. The quality behind the wheel was plain to see, qualifying in ninth on his debut and rising to the upper echelons of the field whenever the rain began to fall.

Switching from rear-wheel-drive GT and endurance racing to quick-fire front-wheel-drive touring car racing requires a major mindset change, and while the rest of the first half of the season may not have set the world alight, the flashes of pace we saw from Watson throughout the second half of the year showed that he’s a driver to keep an eye on in the coming seasons.

8. Daniel Rowbottom

Championship: 7th – 226pts

Wins: 1

Dan Rowbottom found himself on the receiving end of quite a lot of unnecessary negativity ahead of the 2023 season when he switched from Team Dynamics to NAPA Racing UK, taking his Cataclean backing with him and making him an easy target from Honda fans following the team’s departure from the championship.

He silenced the critics very early on, sitting on pole position for the opening race of the year. Securing the second win of his career in Thruxton’s reverse grid race was the highlight for Rowbottom in a year which saw the Kidderminster-based driver finish on the podium four times in ten races in a strong mid-season swing. A career-best of seventh at the end of the year capped off a good season, just 17 points shy of team-mate Dan Cammish and setting himself up for more to come should the partnership continue.

7. Ricky Collard

Championship: 8th – 217pts

Best result: 3rd

If Andrew Watson is looking for an example of how it takes time to switch from GTs to the BTCC, he needs only to look at Ricky Collard. The son of former race winner Rob Collard, Ricky nearly turned his back on not just touring car racing but motorsport in general following a deflating 2022 campaign. Luckily for us, and for Speedworks Motorsport, the 27-year-old changed his mind and returned to the Corolla for 2023.

Collard was able to squeeze a result out of the Toyota when team-mate Rory Butcher was struggling, although a career-first victory was denied at the first visit to Brands Hatch despite crossing the line at the head of the field due to exceeding track limits. Collard finished two-thirds of the season in the top ten, and, much like Butcher, if the Toyota squad can get a solid winter testing programme under their belts, 2024 could well be a successful campaign.

6. Josh Cook

Championship: 5th – 268pts

Best result: 2nd

The reigning Independents champion went into this season very much focused on the top trophy rather than retaining his crown. Always seeming to be the driver who simply can’t catch a break, it was anything but a simple year for Cook in 2023. With a lack of any testing over the winter, dramas surrounding Team Dynamics technical staff leaving to join Team HARD instead of the One Motorsport outfit and the team principal jumping ship mid-season, Cook and his team-mates were always on the back foot in their Honda Civics.

Despite all of that, Cook eased his way to a second consecutive Independents’ title and also secured a top five finish at the end of the season. The unwanted statistic for the Somerset man this year, though, was that it was his first season since 2017 without a victory to his name. Even at Thruxton, a circuit where it’d be a brave man who bets against Cook, he could only manage a brace of third-placed results – his strongest weekend of the year.

It’s testament to Cook’s tenacity that he was able to fight near the sharp end of the field despite all of the challenges thrown at him across the year, and perhaps, with a more stable winter and the ability to get some testing mileage underneath him, we could see a genuine title charge in 2024.

5. Dan Cammish

Championship: 6th – 253pts

Wins: 3

At first glance you might wonder how Cammish makes it into our top five at the expense of Josh Cook when Cammish finished sixth in the points, 15 points behind the Honda man. Well, that’s because while Cook may have had a difficult year, Cammish – once again – was dealt with some of the worst luck we’ve ever seen on a race circuit.

What makes it worse is that Cammish’s form at the start of the year was white hot. Two wins at Donington Park and a dominant pole at the Brands Hatch Indy circuit made it seem that it might be the Yorkshireman shaking hands with Alan Gow at the end of the year rather than team-mate Sutton. And then his luck just disappeared. Accidents in qualifying for both Snetterton and Knockhill put him on the back foot, and then he missed the entire weekend on the series’ second visit to Donington Park having written his car off having suffered brake failure in the first practice session.

There is undeniably the talent at his fingertips to be a BTCC champion, and if he sticks in the NAPA camp and can have a trouble-free 2024, he could certainly push Sutton right to the limit.

4. Colin Turkington

Championship: 4th – 312pts

Wins: 4

It certainly feels like we’re ending the end of the Turkington era at the sharp end of the BTCC. He’s still very much strong enough to compete at the front, and is definitely one of the best talents on the grid, but the likelihood of a fifth Turkington title is starting to look quite remote.

He still scored four wins this year, the first coming thanks to fitting the softer rubber in the opening race at the Brands Hatch Indy circuit and the remaining three coming in reverse grid races at Oulton Park, Croft and Silverstone. That still doesn’t quite tell the full story, though, with his Oulton Park weekend perhaps one of the biggest signs that the Northern Irishman has more to show in Britain’s premier tin-top series.

His BMW 3-Series was thrown out from qualifying at the Cheshire circuit having not been able to provide a fuel sample. At a circuit known to be difficult to pass at, the four-time champion carved his way through the field, starting 27th on the grid in race one and finishing fourth in race two before rounding out the day with a winner’s trophy in the final encounter.

3. Jake Hill

Championship: 3rd – 372pts

Wins: 6

Jake Hill’s season started somewhat slowly. It feels strange to say that about the driver who finished the first race of the year on the podium, but the opening four rounds of the year were solid if not spectacular. Three second-placed finishes were not to be sniffed at, but his title rivals were out taking victories and he was sitting 12 points back from WSR elder statesman Colin Turkington.

It would be the fifth round of the season at Oulton Park where that would change and Hill would propel himself into the title hunt. A double victory saw him halve the deficit to the top of the standings, although frustratingly he was followed across the finish line in both races by Sutton and Ingram, lessening the points swing considerably.

Another double victory at Knockhill (thanks to Ingram’s ride height failure in race one) and subsequent trips to the top step at Silverstone and Brands Hatch saw Hill’s season end with six wins, the second-best after the dominant Sutton – although this was still only half of the Ford man’s tally.

2. Tom Ingram

Championship: 2nd – 400pts

Wins: 2

Off the back of an emotional championship victory in 2022, Tom Ingram was one of the pre-season favourites going into 2023 as he returned to the seat of his Hyundai i30 N Fastback for a third successive year.

It’s easy to disregard Ingram’s season when compared to Ash Sutton’s dominance, but that really does the 30-year-old a disservice. The 400 points that Ingram accrued was not only his best-ever tally but would have been enough to see him take the championship in every single season since his debut back in 2015.

It’s also too simple to write off Ingram as ‘only’ scoring two wins across the year. In a 30-race season, there were only two occasions where he wasn’t classified in the top ten – one of which was a disqualification having crossed the line first. In addition to his two victories, Ingram finished on the podium a further 15 times and was the only person capable of overthrowing Sutton in the final round.

1. Ash Sutton

Championship: 1st – 446pts

Wins: 12

Naming the number one driver of the 2023 BTCC season is perhaps the easiest task anyone will face across the entire year. There’s simply no argument for anyone other than Ash Sutton to sit atop this list in a record-breaking year that cemented him as one of the greatest BTCC drivers of all time.

Not only did he win a fourth Drivers’ Championship to put him on a par with Andy Rouse and Colin Turkington as the most successful BTCC driver in the history of the championship, but he also either equalled or set new records for the most wins and pole positions in a single season in the process. Sutton also became the only driver to ever win the top crown in both front- and rear-wheel-drive machinery. 

Every time Sutton stepped into his NAPA Racing UK Ford Focus, he looked unbeatable. There were a couple of hiccups along the way, of course, but that’s to be expected in a 30-race season. The simple fact is that the chasing pack are going to have to get their collective acts together across the winter if they’re to stand any chance of denying Sutton a fifth title in 2024.

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